The Mixed Tape

[Disclaimer: If you’re a regular reader, you’ve probably come here expecting some snark. So, I want you to know that this post is going to get totally emo. Consider yourself warned.]

I’ve been kind of a Luddite with this whole newfangled music thing. I don’t have an Ipod. This tends to cause consternation among friends and acquaintances. As my friend J said when told that neither Lord Kissington or I had one, “Isn’t there some sort of law that a couple in your demographic who’s so into music has to have at least one Ipod?” And he’s probably right, but we’ve broken that unwritten law. Here’s the thing: I have nothing against Ipods. Far from it, I’m planning to get one. It’s just that until last week, we had an aging laptop with not much memory, certainly not enough to support the massive amount of music we would be getting ourselves into, and no capacity for copying. And my trusty portable CD player had been serving me well.

But this has all changed. We’re not yet hooked up to the internetz (seriously, Verizon, how many days do you need to flip a switch?), but I’ve been exploring all this music stuff on the fancy new computer (henceforth to be known as FNC). Right after we got the FNC set up, I made myself two CDs, taking all the tracks I liked from a bunch of CDs I’d gotten recently, saving myself the trouble of carrying around a bunch of CDs just to listen to one or two songs. And it was so easy (yes, I know, isn’t it amusing that I’ve entered the 21^st century) that I decided to make a mix for a friend. He’s burned me a bunch of stuff recently, and I’ve been promising to return the favor once I got the FNC. I wrote up a list. I thought it about. I revised the list. And then I even wrote liner notes. (I’m a huge dork, but January is a dead month and I have a lot of free time on my hands.) The liner notes were really fun to write, because most of the songs I put on the mix had some sort of history for me. Not that I put all that history in the notes, because my friend doesn’t really need to know that “Holland 1945” is emblematic of a relationship that went nowhere and caused me lots of angst, but writing up the more generic comments did make me remember why I liked each song. And it got me thinking about all the mixed tapes I made over the years.

That’s right: mixed tapes. There’s something about the phrase mixed CD that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like mixed tape does. I used to make mixed tapes for myself and others all the time. My favorite mixed tape from college was so good that Lord Merlin borrowed it and refused to give it back. I was able to steal it back a few years later, but now it no longer plays and I don’t have the case anymore, so I don’t know all the songs on it. Someday, I’m going to try to recreate it.

I used to make mixed tapes for boys I liked or was dating. In high school, I had a huge crush on an older guy. I poured my little emo heart into making the most awesomest mixed tape ever, one that would say, “Lady Tiara has amazing, really mature taste in music, and you should totally fall in love with her, even though she’s technically jailbait.” It didn’t make him fall in love with me, but he did tell me that it got him into the Replacements. I guess that’s something.

(I told Bryc3 I was writing a post about mixed tapes, and he said “You obviously have to mention the ‘I made you this mix tape, you wanna do it?’ angle that most men you know employed throughout the nineties, myself included.” Ummh, it wasn’t just men. Not that it worked so much.)

In college, I didn’t just hand my mixed tapes out to anyone; you had to be really special to get one. I used to labor over the list of songs. Every song had to mean something. Or be really awesome. Or say, “this is the girl for you.” (I was so emo in college*.) I made one really amazing mixed tape for a certain young man. He was suitably impressed. We made out, but things didn’t work out. Later, I might have made out with his friend and then even later his friend might have realized he was gay**. But it was still a really awesome mixed tape.

I also made a lot of mixed tapes for myself. I came across one recently that I had made for a party, and I listened to it and it wasn’t half bad. But I only made mixes for my own parties or if someone asked me to provide one for them. Showing up at someone else’s party and insisting on putting on your own mix is really the height of douchebaggery. I had a friend who used to do this all the time, and he would actually carry around what he referred to (and was labeled as such) “the [his last name] party mix.” It was actually a really lame mix, filled with the type of songs my mother enjoys dancing to at her office Christmas party. In retrospect, he kind of sucked.

When I first started dating Mr. Ex a million years ago, he made me a mixed tape. It was a truly excellent mixed tape. One side was slower songs and the other was faster songs (the whole side thing is really lost with CDs, isn’t it?). I played it over and over again, and not that I wouldn’t have fallen for him anyway, but the tape didn’t hurt, as I was majorly impressed with his taste in music. But in this case, the mixed tape was completely misleading. Those 20 songs represented the absolute best of his music collection. There wasn’t much else, and within a year, he was listening to a bunch of crap that would barely pass muster on an adult contemporary station. I was 24 and I had somehow signed on to a relationship with a prematurely old man. He also hated about 75% of what I was listening to at the time, so to keep the peace, I tended to only listen to my music when he wasn’t around***. (Shortly after he gave me the mixed tape, I made one for him. I can’t tell you a single song that was on that tape, which is kind of weird. I guess I’ve blocked out a lot of that relationship.)

We eventually went through an ugly breakup, one of those ones that goes on for months. After a couple of years, we sort of reestablished a friendship. It was fraught with difficulty and often not worth the trouble. But one part of it was another exchange of mixed tapes. The one I gave him was just a compilation of songs I was listening to at the time. It probably included Air, Paul Weller, and Built to Spill. The mix he made for me was pretty good, better than I expected. It seemed that his taste in music improved after we broke up, except that he included a song by Belle and Sebastian, one of my least favorite bands of all time. Lord Kissington is totally into them. I guess I should be grateful that Mr. Ex only got into them after we split up. He also included a couple of songs from 69 Love Songs by Magnetic Fields, including the lovely “Yeah! Oh Yeah!” Here’s a sample of the lyrics:

I though if we lived apart
we could made a brand-new start
Do you want to break my heart?
Yeah! Oh, yeah!
I've enjoyed making you
miserable for years
found peace of mind in
playing on your fears
How I loved to catch your gold
and silver tears, but now my dear
What a dark and dreary life
Are you reaching for a knife?
Could you really kill your wife?
Yeah! Oh, yeah!
Oh, I die, I die, I die!
So it’s over, you and I
Was my whole life just a lie?
Yeah! Oh, yeah!

Cheery song. I get the feeling he was trying to tell me something.

During the period between that bad breakup and the beginning of things with Lord Kissington (a time I like to call “the first date of the month club”), another guy made me a mixed tape. It was ostensibly for a party we were throwing, but he put “our” song (or a song that could at least partially be considered “our” song because we listened to it together once), so that totally meant he loved me, right? I analyzed every track on it, wondering if there were any hidden meanings.

“Do you think he put ‘Love Is a Drug’ on it because he, ummh, lurves me?” I whined to a friend.
“Yeah, sure. Or he likes Roxy Music. How the hell should I know?” she replied.

Things didn’t work out, but it was still an awesome mix. I still listen to it occasionally and it allows me to forget all of his really annoying qualities. That’s the power of the mixed tape.

I made Lord Kissington a mix after we had been dating for a few weeks. It was kind of a reciprocal mix, since he had given me one on our first date****. This mixed tape wasn’t a “fall in love with you tape.” It was a “I know you’ve already fallen for me and I just want you to share my love for all my favorites bands, especially the Get Up Kids, even though I know you totally hate emo” mixed tape. He was grateful and all, and it did spark an interest in all things Paul Weller, but he’s still not crazy about the Get Up Kids. Sigh.

I’ll leave you with these lyrics from the totally awesome and extra emo-licious song “The Mixed Tape” by Jack’s Mannequin. They totally get what I am trying to say:

Where are you now?
As I’m swimming through the stereo
I’m writing you a symphony of sound
Where are you now?
As I rearrange the songs again
This mix could burn a hole in anyone
But it was you I was thinking of

And I can’t get to you
I can’t get to you
I can’t get to you

*As I type this, my meddlesome inner voice says, “Just in college? Could you be possibly anymore emo now?”

**Really, the friend telling me that I reminded him of Elizabeth Taylor should have clued me in.

***Yes, now I can see that this wasn’t the most healthy relationship.

****Totally not as creepy as it sounds. We had known each for months and used to talk about music a lot, and I had expressed interest in hearing more of some bands he was into.